This past Sunday afternoon, Terry Blanchette had a pressing concern not typical of a young man in his twenties.

“He had just started potty training his daughter and was taking that job very seriously,” says Tammy Tracey. “I’d asked him to come in to work early, to help train a new cook. He was happy to do it, but told me he missed out on some of his usual snuggle time with Hailey.”

A few short hours later, the 27-year-old single father was dead, his two-year-old daughter taken from the modest two-storey duplex where they lived in Blairmore. By late Tuesday evening, even more bad news was to come: police had found human remains they believed to be those of Hailey Dunbar-Blanchette.

In those early hopeful hours of Tuesday, though, people like Tracey were still hoping for a miracle, even though the front door sign on Pure Country Grill & Pub in the tiny community of Frank says it’s closed because of a “family” tragedy.

“That’s what he was to us, family,” says Tracey, the pub’s manager who hired a then-rudderless Blanchette four years ago. “He didn’t go to the bar and socialize after work, he went home to Hailey. He totally loved that little girl.”

RCMP investigators at the scene of the disappearance of Hailey Dunbar-Blanchette in Blairmore, Alta., Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2015.Jeff McIntosh /
THE CANADIAN PRESS

Like the staff of 25 she oversees at the popular highway-side establishment, Tracey also loved the child with light brown hair and a penchant for scrunching up her nose when she smiled.

“She doesn’t go for chocolate, she likes cauliflower and broccoli,” says Tracey, making sure to speak of the then still missing child in the present tense. “She always says please and thank you … this is just unbelievable, this doesn’t make any sense.”

Throughout the scenic southern Alberta mountain pass known as the Croswnest, the reverberations of Blanchette’s tragic death and his daughter’s disappearance were palpable Tuesday afternoon.

“Hailey and her grandpa always sit at this table,” says Jody Wong, who with her husband runs his eponymous Ben Wong Chinese restaurant. “She is a very good girl, she sits in her seat and doesn’t run around,” said Wong.

Last Thursday, the little girl was at her usual spot, drinking milk from her sippy cup and looking delighted when Wong handed her a wrapped Chinese candy after lunch. All Monday and Tuesday, she says, customers have expressed fears for the child, their concern that she is out there, afraid, cold and hungry.

“A lot of sad people, a lot of customers that know her,” says Wong, as two police officers holding clipboards walk down the sidewalk just outside the restaurant. “All we are doing is hoping and praying that the police will find her soon, that she will be fine.”

While RCMP officers did their work in various pockets in and around town, the usually quiet town was clearly not its usual self. By late afternoon, the tension boiled over when a group of camera operators and broadcast reporters approached Blanchette’s sister outside the RCMP detachment.

“Yes, he had a sketchy past,” Amanda Blanchette, responding to earlier news reports of her brother’s brushes with the law, told the crowd. “But he turned it around for his baby … we want her back, we want her safe.”

As the sun sets on the mountains surrounding this town so accustomed to feeling immune from big city crime, close to 100 congregated in a downtown park, holding candles as they sang and prayed for the little girl.

Less than an hour into their moving vigil, their hopes are crushed when an RCMP victim services worker arrived to tell them of the gruesome discovery. Sobs rang though the night air from family, friends and strangers. A block away, police quietly removed the yellow tape surrounding the home where the child and her father spent their happy mornings snuggling.

It was an outcome people like Tammy Tracey — “I have a bad feeling,” she told me at the end of our conversation hours earlier — didn’t want to believe, but knew in their hearts might be true. Still, it is a reality that come the next morning’s sunrise, will have shaken this pretty little corner of the world to its very core.

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